Through the Interface

Getting your AutoCAD layer report into Excel

A philosophical question regarding the Layer Reporter tool came up in a recent discussion with Tony Tanzillo. Tony suggested that using XML and XSLT would have been a better way to implement the tool, and in many ways I agree with him (I’ve been an advocate of XML for many years… during my interview to join Autodesk back in 1995 I presented a session on “Electronic Publishing Formats”, which covered HTML generation from SGML – a pre-cursor to XML – and since then I’ve used XML regularly and on quite significant projects, such as during the redesign of the... Read more →

Breaking news: ADN members can attend AU Virtual for free

For any Autodesk Developer Network members who have not already signed up for AUv, in the upcoming edition of our DevNews newsletter you’ll find a discount code allowing you to received a free Premier Pass for AU Virtual (normally worth $99). If you don’t know who in your organisation receives DevNews, please send us an email with your ADN number and we’ll get you the information. And if you do manage to attend, please do join one of my F# sessions (here are some other AutoCAD-related AUv sessions, and I know Jeremy’s also delivering one on Revit families). Read more →

Quick tour of the AUv experience

If you’re curious about the AU Virtual experience (perhaps you’ve signed up and are wondering what it’s going to be like, perhaps you’re thinking about signing up but would like to know what you’re getting into, or perhaps you have no intention whatsoever of signing up but just want to know what 13,000+ other people are going to be doing next week :-) then check out this video: And if you end up attending AUv, I’m sure there are plenty of virtual seats left in my F# class! :-) Read more →

Using Erlang-style message passing from F# to coordinate asynchronous tasks in AutoCAD

This is something I’ve been meaning to attempt for a while, and have finally been spurred to do it by next week’s AU Virtual session on F#. Not that I expect to have time to present this during the session (60 minutes is already feeling way too short for the material I want to cover), but I at least wanted to have this working so I could present with a touch more authority. :-) In last year’s session we used Asynchronous Workflows to improve the performance of IO-bound operations, such as retrieving multiple RSS feeds and displaying the results... Read more →

Minor update to the Layer Reporter Plugin of the Month

A comment on the code posted in the last post regarding the upcoming Plugin of the Month for the month of December, Layer Reporter, gave me some pause for thought. Tony Tanzillo suggested that making more complete use of the StringBuilder object – rather than direct string concatenation using “&” – would improve the performance of the plugin. As I mentioned in my own comment, Terry’s original code did make heavier use of the StringBuilder, but while adjusting the HTML output to make it lighter-weight I introduced a number of string concatenation operations: looking back there were several that... Read more →

Preview of December’s Plugin of the Month: Layer Reporter

I feel like I’m posting a lot about our Plugin of the Month initiative, at the moment, but then I suppose it’s to some degree a function of what I’m spending time on. It’s definitely eating into the time I would normally focus on blogging… after a number of AU-related posts coming out over the next few weeks (as I finish my AU prep next week and then blog from the event the week after) I’d hope to return to somewhat more typical posts in December (although as I’m going on to Japan, Korea and China from Las Vegas,... Read more →

Updated version of Screenshot now available

We’ve had a few reports of issues with the Screenshot “Plugin of the Month”. They fall into two main categories: Attempting to NETLOAD the application DLL from a network share Within the ReadMe for each of the plugins we’ve documented that each application’s DLL module should be copied to the local file system – preferably inside the AutoCAD Program Files folder – before being loaded by NETLOAD. We recommend this because it essentially stops users from hitting a whole category of .NET Framework-related problems when loading and running the plugins. If you didn’t heed this advice then you’d probably... Read more →

Turing test for live bank chat (failed)

Important note: If you’re only interested in programming-related posts (rather than those related to interpersonal or possibly human-computer interaction) please stop reading. I lived in the US between 2000 and 2003, and have since kept a bank account there which – among other things – makes online shopping easier, on occasion. Anyway, my bank over there (which shall remain nameless) has recently changed their policy regarding my account, as my salary is being paid elsewhere: basically they wanted to start charging me a $9.95 monthly fee. I phoned the bank and negotiated a fee waiver for the coming 12... Read more →

November’s Plugin of the Month: Screenshot

Given the previous posts on this topic, I’d hope it’s no great surprise to regular readers that this month’s “Plugin of the Month” consists of a tool to simplify the capturing of screenshots within AutoCAD. This month’s tool allows you to capture the current document, the entire application and an area of the drawing specified by the user or the extents of a set of objects, sending the results to a file or to the clipboard. It has optional settings to remap the background colour (which is useful for people working with a non-white background colour but who want... Read more →

Shaan by name, shorn by nature

OK, I suppose the title only really works if you have a British accent and mispronounce Mr. Hurley’s name, but anyway. :-) For those of you heading to AU, you may be interested in a rather fun offer being made by Shaan Hurley over on his blog. For $2,000 donated to charity (Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a foundation battling breast cancer) plus 2,000 followers on Twitter, Shaan will let someone shave his head. I, on the other hand, would let someone shave my head for a Sierra Nevada and a $5 casino chip, but then I suppose... Read more →

Detecting the use of the shift and control keys during an AutoCAD jig using .NET

Another interesting little problem, that of how to detect the use of modifier keys during a jig operation (to indicate different jig behaviour). In this case the specific task was to detect the use of the Control and Shift keys, which – if held down during the jig – should cause our object to display differently. I started with the code from this previous post which uses a DrawJig to place text in the plane of the screen during the jig operation. I initially thought I’d have to use a message filter (as shown in this previous post), but... Read more →

AU 2009 classes, both physical and virtual

As mentioned in this previous post, at this year’s Autodesk University the “Developer Track” has rightly been combined with the “Customization & Programming” track (it made sense to rationalise these two tracks which had a very similar style of class). So unlike in previous years, the sessions we’re either presenting or helping coordinate are listed with the “CP” prefix. Here’s a quick round-up of the AutoCAD-related physical classes, labs and panel sessions being presented either by my team or by members of Engineering (with my team helping coordinate): CP104-1 Using .NET 4.0 with AutoCAD Albert Szilvasy CP308-4 AutoCAD VBA... Read more →

Turning AutoCAD into a Spirograph using F#

I’ve been toying for some time with the idea of writing some code to turn AutoCAD into a Spirograph, a device which I’m sure fascinated and inspired many of you as children (just as it did me). I chose to write the application in F# for a couple of reasons: this type of task is fundamentally mathematical in nature – so a functional programming language should be well-suited to the task – and I needed to dust off my F# skills in time for my F# class at AU. Searching the web I came across this helpful post providing... Read more →